What’s Next in New England? Just Take a Look at the MITX Technology Award Winners

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Yesterday evening, it was time again for the MITX Technology Awards. This was the seventh time the yearly awards were handed out by the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange, an organization of 7,500 New England professionals in the Internet business and marketing field.

Winners were announced in eleven categories, in addition to several “Best of” awards and the PricewaterhouseCoopers Promise Awards. The prize ceremony at the Marriott Copley Place in Boston was attended by more than 350 industry professionals.

Some of the companies popped up on the stage several times—including Lexington, MA-based Gemvara, which won the category prize for E-commerce/Alternative Retail and also the Best Sector Impact award. Gemvara is an online shop where jewelry buyers can customize their own rings, necklaces, and earrings. With a click, users can combine different designs with different stones and metals, then see what the finished piece will look like and how much it will cost.

This year there were actually two Best Sector Impact awards. The other went to Panjiva, which also won the PwC Promise award. Panjiva has developed a global-trade intelligence platform that helps businesses identify trustworthy suppliers overseas.

The PricewaterhouseCoopers Promise Award winner Episend has another interesting and easy-to-adopt application. Using a simple drag and drop interface, Episiend makes it easy to add text, pictures, video clips, sound files, and other large files directly to e-mail messages, presented just the way users want.

Finally, this year’s Innovation Hall of Fame Honoree was Jeremy Allaire, who founded online video hosting company Brightcove in 2004 (see Xconomy’s 2008 Q&A with Allaire here). “I am a Bostonian since this community is friendly [and] supportive,” Allaire said in his acceptance speech. “It is good to do business here and the direct links to our excellent universities is inspiring, motivating and also make it easy to find skilled people to hire, which we need.” Today Brightcove employs 230 people, but by the end of this year the company will have grown to 300, Allaire said.